A-X-L Cements Me as a Cat Person

A-X-L (2018)

A-X-L stands for Attack Exploration and Logistics, so I will be referring to the movie as A-E-L for the rest of this review. A-E-L would have been a better movie if it started the way that Old Yeller ends. A-E-L was an atrocity of a film and had no redeeming qualities. It is about a robot dog that gets found by a down on his luck motocross racer. With that premise, this should not have been as boring or slow as it was. The few action scenes were shown in the trailer in their entirety, and they weren’t very good. The story and characters were all one-dimensional clichés and displayed absolutely no growth. The lead male is one of the worst actors I have ever seen. His delivery had the inflection of a light-switch, either 100% and painfully on or completely off. The lead female was fine, but had awful dialogue and archaic female character flaws holding her back. The antagonists were a 1970s style high school bully and a corporate shill trying to protect his investment at all costs. Both were horribly written and performed. Now that I have sufficiently eviscerated the cast, lets talk about the actual robot dog. The dog was equal parts laughable CGI and outdated animatronics. When the dog was up close, it was an actual model of the dog, but in any scene it could only move one or two parts. When it was CGI, it had a full range of motion, but it was very clearly CGI. A-E-L’s inconsistencies almost make the movie funny, but the movie was so slow and plodding that jumping between a real robot and the cartoon robot could not save it. The directing was also painful. There were five scenes where some loser was streaming on something like Facebook Live and every time, he had 1.5K viewers. Regardless what was happening, it was always 1.5K viewers. Sick motocross trick? 1.5K viewers. First evidence of sentient robot dog? 1.5K viewers. Teenagers dancing in front of a bonfire? 1.5K viewers. The finale of Cheers? 1.5K viewers. And the director never noticed that the protagonist had a scratch on his neck that was in a different spot every scene. I can only hope that one day A-E-L gets viewed by the guys at Mystery Science Theater 3000. Overall, A-E-L was the worst movie so far this year and earns 0 out of the 15 times I checked my watch during the movie.